Day of Reckoning

It’s barely noon on Election Day as the Stranger Election Control
Board (SECB) is sitting down to write this, and man, do we need a
drink.

But drinking is for later. Today, the SECB is all about watching the
polls, talking to the volunteers, and hanging out with the
candidates.

For the SECB, Election Day 2008 started on a rainy morning at 7:00
a.m., with a damp bus ride past dozens of people waving signs for mass
transit, Governor Christine Gregoire, and, of course, Barack Obama. Our
bus driver honked loudly as she passed a crowd of mass-transit
supporters and blinked her lights as she cruised past the Dems—a
nod, we assumed, to the “nonpartisan” position of King County
Metro.

“The honk-to-finger ratio has been about 40 to 1,” Mass Transit Now
volunteer Sara Nikolic told the SECB.

A few miles away at Fourth Avenue and Pike Street downtown, two
volunteers braved the cold and rain to wave “Support Our Market” signs.
One of them was a shivering Marlys Erickson, director of the Pike Place
Market Foundation. Decked out in signs for Obama and the market,
Erickson sounded worried. She told the SECB, “I spent several nights
calling older voters who said, ‘My pension is in the toilet, so I have
to vote no on all the levies.’ That scared the bejeezus out of me.”

As early as 8:00 a.m., polls around the city were at crush capacity.
One poll worker on Capitol Hill told us, “We’ve never had such a
turnout.” In Ballard, the Central District, West Seattle, and South
Seattle, the story was the same: long lines, excited voters, and weary
poll workers laboring to get everyone through the polls in an election
where turnout was expected to top 85 percent. It was also the last-ever
poll vote in King County, which will join 37 other Washington State
counties when it switches to all-mail voting next year.

The Democratic Party headquarters on East Mercer Street was crawling
with phone bankers and strewn with campaign signs by 9:00 a.m., when
Democratic governor Gregoire—facing a tough reelection campaign
against Dino Rossi—showed up to rally supporters at the first of
eight campaign appearances on Election Day. Wearing a Christmasy wool
sweater and a red turtleneck, Gregoire seemed upbeat about her
reelection chances, although her speech—like the warm-up talk
given by Senator Patty Murray—focused primarily on the
real reason volunteers were excited.

“Washington State is going to decide tonight that they want [to]
partner with Barack Obama,” Gregoire exclaimed. “This is the day we’re
taking back this country!” Gregoire was among the first elected
officials in Washington State to endorse Obama.

Over at the Baltic Room, a club on Capitol Hill that usually doesn’t
see a soul before 10:00 p.m., the tables upstairs were full with
earnest Democratic volunteers at 11:00 a.m. Sipping bottles of organic
Honest Tea and dialing furiously on their cell phones, the volunteers
hit up voters in the 43rd District in a last-minute get-out-the-vote
effort for Obama. Mel Lotz, a young volunteer who was training callers
and giving them copies of the top-secret calling scripts (confined to
the building lest they fall into Republican hands), told one
exasperated voter who’d received several calls from Obama supporters
already: “We get that you’re annoyed by us. Get out and vote and we’ll
stop calling you.”

Just a few blocks away, Babeland was giving away free Vibratex
Maverick sleeves—a phrase the SECB would rather never type
again—and Silver Bullet vibrators to anyone who could prove they
had voted. By 11:45 a.m., Babeland had gone through 113 masturbatory
aids, including all its Maverick sleeves. “We didn’t think it was going
to be so popular,” Audrey McManus, Babeland’s education coordinator,
told the SECB. In Babeland’s window, a bubble-gum-pink butt plug was
painted to look like Sarah Palin. A note attached to the toy read,
“Sarah suggests: Lipstick!”

Several miles away in Renton, a different kind of Election Day
action was taking place. About 500 people were on the floor of King
County Elections headquarters—an 11-month-old building equipped
with 59 security cameras, a high-security inner area, and an outer
“closed perimeter loop” where anyone who wants to can come and watch
the action. When we were there, one lonely family was walking the loop:
The White family of Des Moines, who brought their daughters, 11 and 8,
to check it out. The SECB, unlike the general public, was allowed down
on the floor, where, according to King County Elections spokeswoman
Bobbie Egan, between 80,000 and 100,000 absentee ballots were being
counted. Did you know there’s a whole team of election workers trained
to detect whether the signature on your ballot matches your voting
record? Neither did the SECB.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the universe in Redmond, Democrat
Darcy Burner—challenging U.S. Representative Dave Reichert for
his 8th District congressional seat—cast her ballot at Timberlake
Christian Fellowship. (Mayor Greg Nickels invited media to watch him
cast his own ballot this morning at 7:30 a.m. at Admiral Congregational
Church in West Seattle. What will politicians do next year, when all
voters cast their ballots by mail? The SECB does not know.) Burner told
the SECB she was “feeling pretty good” about the election. Her campaign
spokesman, Sandeep Kaushik, couldn’t say the same thing—at 5:30
a.m. on Election Day, he was headed for the hospital, where he spent
the day incapacitated by a kidney stone.

Back at Democratic Party headquarters, the mood was one of
controlled chaos as volunteers awaited instructions and the first
election returns. (One day earlier, the headquarters was a hive of
activity, as volunteers made 4,000 sack lunches for volunteers across
the state—using up a case of peanut butter.) The walls were
plastered with signs for Obama and Gregoire, the tables were littered
with half-eaten doughnuts, and the classroom-sized main room was packed
with more than 60 volunteers. One volunteer, Pam Goodman, told the SECB
about a conversation she had on the phone with a voter who was “still
worried about Obama’s relationship with Reverend [Jeremiah] Wright.”
Goodman said, “I was able to convince her that it was all character
assassination.”

After a quick stop at the Comet on Capitol Hill (where a second-time
voter who would only identify himself as Owen said he’d be drinking
dollar beers “until Obama wins”) the SECB headed up to Northwest
Seattle, where a blue-fleece-clad John Burbank—competing against
fellow Democrat Reuven Carlyle in a tight race for state representative
in the 36th District—was knocking on doors. Walking through the
mostly empty streets of Ballard, Burbank characterized his opponent as
a corporate lackey who doesn’t care about the middle class. Everyone
who opened their doors told Burbank they’d already voted for
him—not too surprising, considering this part of the 36th is
Burbank’s stronghold. (The SECB also spent some time removing campaign
signs with Carlyle, but not, alas, before press time.)

Down on the University of Washington campus, the undergraduate
library was subdued, with a few
televisionless-but-politically-attentive students gathered to watch
election returns on CNN. Kyle, a sociology and political science
undergrad, says he voted for Republican Dino Rossi despite supporting
Obama because “I’m worried about the state budget [and] Gregoire’s
positions on crime.” He calls himself a “Dinocrat.” The SECB refrained
from slapping him, because we’re opposed to political violence.

Up in North Seattle’s 46th District, Gerry Pollet and Scott
White—two Democratic state house candidates who aren’t exactly on
cordial terms, after Pollet’s supporters sued White repeatedly for
alleged ethical violations—somehow found themselves on the exact
same corner. (Pollet’s sign read “Ethics and Integrity”; White’s read
simply “I’m Scott.”) Unsurprisingly, the opponents could not agree on
which one got there first—and neither man would budge from his
position. “I was here first, by a little bit,” White told the SECB.
Nuh-uh, Pollet responded. “We arrived at the exact same moment.”

The SECB got up to a lot more during the day—much, much more,
including a visit to the Drinking Liberally troops at the Montlake Ale
House, dropping in on the LGBT “Out for Obama” party at Neighbours,
listening in as KIRO’s Ron and Don broadcasted live from an Obama
fundraiser at Tini Bigs, and a final stop at Gregoire campaign
headquarters—but we’re running out of time and we’ve got parties
to go to.